@starasset asked for four headcanons I have about our muse’s relationship.
001. based off of our fight thread, soldier boy’s first and most persistent feeling toward annie is betrayal. it’s guilt by association. she’s with the group that robbed him of the one clean objective he believed he had earned: killing homelander. he does not care that annie chose civilians, ryan, or the staff inside vought tower. the broken agreement matters more to him than the moral varnish behind her explanation. she was in the room, she acted against him, and his worldview does not allow much space between “circumstance” and “treachery.” this stems from the fact that he’s jaded by being used, so he projects that onto her, even though she rose a point by saying she had nothing to do with his deal with butcher. but the fact that she did it for reasons she can defend only pushes her further down on his shitlist, because it means she is not going to be asking for forgiveness anytime soon. she is standing inside her choice. with another person, that might earn respect. with soldier boy, it makes the offense harder to dismiss.
002. her modern brand of heroism annoys him. he wants to dismiss it as weak, and he does on the surface, yet he cannot fully reduce it to cowardice. from what he understood about her former position, she was vought’s bright little church-girl: clean face, gold light, public-friendly morality, easy for americans to clap for because she appeared virtuous without requiring them to think too hard about what virtue costs. but the more she fights him, the more he sees that she is not the caricature vought once promoted. she can be frightened, exhausted, bleeding like a stuck pig, outmatched by a formidable force, and still keep choosing the moral argument he finds so useless. another element to it is that back in the 60s, he was used to white people betraying “the cause” for their own agendas, and he believed she would be no different from the ones he broke down before. her resistance complicates that assumption.
003. the racialized and gendered history of soldier boy’s own iconography makes annie’s resistance particularly insulting to him. soldier boy is a far worse villainous man than homelander because he was created as the old american enforcer of the empire’s will: the flag, the shield, masculinity, state violence, punishment, and the "land of the free" myth (lie) all compressed into one masculine white body. annie dragging secrets into public, countering the pretty lies vought put on her name, and rallying more people behind her makes her dangerous. one part of him does not care about the consequences vought brought on itself. this is not his era, and he has no sentimental loyalty to every idiot currently steering the company. at the same time, vought remains the only powerful entity he knows that can make his name worth something again. that forces him to begrudgingly stand by the corporation and snuff out dissenters wherever he sees them.
004. to swing back around to white dissent he has seen before: back in the 60s and 70s, he was used to white activists attaching themselves to civil rights movements, antiwar protests, student uprisings, and black liberation struggles, sometimes from real conviction, sometimes from vanity, sometimes from guilt, and sometimes because the government had already found a way to turn them into liabilities. at first, he does not see annie as anything different. but one thing he knows about history is that a white woman’s voice is dangerous. only this time it is not being weaponized against the oppressed. the starlighter movement is enough to tell him that her breathing makes disobedience toxic and contagious.
how he views annie's rebellion is different from a-train ( @supesprint ). with a-train, as he understands it currently, he's vought property that defected from the brand that made him valuable.
side note: without vought, the fbi's ghetto listening posts that were installed across many black communities in the 60s probably would've saw his family jailed if even one of them expressed an inkling of unrest at the status quo. the franklin family ( as well as sister sage @sistrsaged ) would've especially been under surveillance because the black families that were allowed to give their children V were high priority to maintain surveillance over. but anyway...
... annie presents a old problem to him, just modernized: white virtue stepping out if its assigned and privileged lane and using its power as a weapon against the institution the blessed it with power. a-train's resistance subconsciously comes across as property leaving the plantation, whereas he sees annie as a public-facing moral symbol turning the crowd against the house that built her up.
i said it already, but to emphasize this: soldier boy has dealt with white activists before, including the ones who thought proximity to the cause made them untouchable and the ones who folded once pressure came down hard enough. some of them were sincere. some were honestly stupid, adrenaline junkies with no sense that parasitically latched onto causes because it was "fun" and made them feel important. some were (or became) informants. some were broken into betraying people who trusted them. all of them, to him, belonged to the same operational category once the state and or vought called for them to be addressed accordingly.
soldier boy was not only built for foreign enemies, his utility has always included domestic soil. sometimes that meant physical force. sometimes that meant intimidation, surveillance, publicity, or pressure applied through less obvious channels. soldier boy was involved with spycraft (points to vought rising). sometimes that includes developing relationships you otherwise would not have had.
so if soldier boy slept with, or attempted to sleep with annie, that would not require him to stop seeing her as an enemy. his generation and his field history already prepared him for the fact that political opposition and physical intimacy are not cleanly separated categories. informants slept near the folks they betrayed. agents passed through movements by becoming lovers, confidants, handlers, drinking partners, and sympathizers. desire could be leverage as much as access could be weaponized.
that does not mean soldier boy would approach annie with that type of intelligence operation in mind. he's not that delicate. but, in his mind, wanting her and wanting to punish her do not contradict each other. any remote attraction does not erase the betrayal. she's still a country-wide problem, a traitor of the highest order, a woman, a supe, and a challenge wrapped up in one pretty white blonde.
if he could ruin the image of the next jean dorothy seberg, then he'd absolutely would, even if it means opting for the psychological warfare sex would bring. if her public power comes from being seen as moral, spotless, and luminous, then part of him would want to force her into the same dirt he believes everyone else already lives in. because at the end of the day, who isn't dirty?
